Carolyn J.
Rose
Recently Mike and I
took a young friend to an animated movie about a snail who yearned to go fast.
Like many books and movies aimed at kids, at its core were lessons about family,
dreams, determination, discouragement, doubts, fears, and belief in yourself and
your possibilities.
Those lessons seemed
overly obvious to us, but perhaps they weren’t to kids in the audience who were
caught up in the story and able to suspend disbelief.
Later, I thought
about the movies of my youth and realized the same messages were there—messages
about getting past ridicule, breaking out of loneliness, discovering the thing
you can do and having the courage to try, again and again, to do
it.
Those were all fine
messages, even heroic messages. They prepared me to believe I could succeed. And
the stories that contained those messages also prepared me for failure—but
failure as a temporary thing, failure as a time-out before another attempt to
reach the goal, not failure as the standard for the rest of my
life.
The ones who failed
in these movies were the characters who bullied or cheated or lied or attempted
to harm the gutsy protagonist. In real life it isn’t always that way. The proof
of that statement is on the nightly news and in your morning
paper.
Sometimes the coyote
catches the roadrunner. Often those mice don’t escape from the cartoon cat. Most
of the time a snail wouldn’t win the big race.
But the lessons
remain. You may not cross the finish line first. You may not cross it at all.
But if you don’t get out there on the track, you’ll never
know.
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